If you reached this page before reading the Summary of Analysis, read it first. This will give you a bigger picture.

Overview

We are about to commit environmental heresy. Everything you are about to read runs against orthodox environmentalism so it can't possibly be true. It can't possibly work.

The analysis divided the sustainability problem into four smaller subproblems. The most important is: How to overcome change resistance. This is the crux of the problem because if it can't be solved none of the other subproblems are solvable. Once change resistance is overcome the system will "want" to solve the other three subproblems because social agents are now biased to solving any and all problems whose solution would benefit the common good.

Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied. If a problem has resisted attempts to solve it for long, that proves that change resistance is the crux of that problem. Change resistance must be treated as a distinct and separate problem to be solved first. Therefore:

Until system change resistance is overcome,
all other work is largely wasted effort.

Seeing things this way is environmental heresy. It's also the only way forward.

If environmentalists sincerely want to solve the sustainability problem, they need to stop doing what they're doing and switch to overcoming change resistance. Solution work like promoting ways you can be green, lobbying to get stronger regulations passed, campaigning on this cause and that one, and conservation efforts should stop. It's making only a little difference. It's feel good environmentalism, not effective environmentalism.

I was discussing why this might be so with my cousin over the Christmas holidays in 2011. He said "To admit another approach could work is to admit that your approach is wrong."

Substep A - Find the immediate cause of the problem symptoms in terms of the system's dominant feedback loops

The symptoms of change resistance are successful opposition to passing proposed laws for solving the sustainability problem. Change resistance is so strong that:

In 1999 the US Senate voted 95 to zero against signing the Kyoto Protocol climate change treaty, despite a democratic president and a strongly pro-sustainability vice-president, Al Gore, at the time.

The Kyoto Protocol is now nearly dead. China, India, and the US refuse to support it. Canada and Japan have pulled out. All the nations of the world could agree on at the latest summit in 2011 was to keep talking, though more optimistic interpretations are possible.

Global Ecological Footprint growth continues with no end in sight, despite the work of millions of environmentalists for over 30 years. The planet is now at about 50% overshoot.

Economic growth mania continues. Nothing else is more important to nations than GDP growth. Yet that mindset needs to change. Nothing can grow forever. Only a steady, non-growing GDP can be sustainable. Furthermore, to correct the massive effects of decades of overshoot, negative GDP growth will be required until the Ecological Footprint is below the world's carrying capacity.

The loop grows in strength by using corruption in the form of highly appealing falsehood and favoritism. This increases the number of supporters of corrupt politicians, which increases their influence, which in turn increases their power to peddle still more falsehood and favoritism. Over time the loop can grow to tragically high levels.

Here's how the loop works. Special interests are a minority by definition. If they want something that benefits them and not the common good (such as preferential treatment via new laws) then they can't use the truth to argue their case. They must resort to falsehoods, called false memes on the model. These are broadcast via articles, talk shows, books, speeches, biased think tanks, biased media outlets, and so on. The false memes are broadcast to Not Infected Neutralists, also known as swing voters or uncommitted voters.

Depending on how high memetic infectivity is, a certain percentage of neutralists will be infected. Once the infection matures, they move from the pool of Not Infected Neutralists to Supporters Due to Degeneration. They have become degenerates. They have descended from the norm of believing the truth. These degenerate supporters will use their influence to spread even more false memes, and the loop begins all over again.

The Dueling Loops model has another loop opposed to the race to the bottom: The Race to the Top among Politicians (shown later below). The race to the top relies on the truth to gain supporters who believe in optimizing the common good of all instead of the uncommon good of special interests.

The symptoms of change resistance show that The Race to the Bottom among Politicians is currently the dominant loop in most nations. The loop is the immediate cause of successful change resistance.

Note how radically different these conclusions are from main stream environmentalism and how they rely on analysis instead of intuition. That's why they are so heretical. They must be the work of some crackpot.

What you have just read is totally outside the mental model of conventional wisdom. The world's environmental activists are not thinking in terms of root cause analysis. Instead, they confidently walk up to the sustainability problem and intuitively conclude that various solutions will work because it's obvious they should. When solutions fail they intuitively try another one. And another.

They fail because they attempt to resolve intermediate causes. The central intermediate cause is the universal fallacious paradigm that Growth Is Good. It's not if it's unsustainable. To attack the Growth Is Good paradigm and replace it with Sustainability Is Good, environmentalists push on the low leverage point of more of the truth. This is the truth about the problem, the truth about solutions like renewable energy and recycling, and the truth about how we need to adopt these solutions now. A more subtle truth is the world needs to move away from quantitative (monetary) growth and towards qualitative (quality of life) growth.

The truth is identified, promoted, and magnified by a number of symptomatic solutions: technical research, environmental magazines and articles, awareness campaigns, marches, sit-ins, lawsuits, lobbying, etc. These solutions are symptomatic because they try to solve the problem by treating the symptoms. They fail because that's like treating a patient's fever by plunging him into a bath of cold water. That won't work and may kill the patient. Much better and more sane is to perform a diagnosis, also known as finding the root causes.

The strategic purpose of this substep is to find what problem solvers have been doing wrong, prove it's wrong by modeling and documenting it, and then use that knowledge to persuade problem solvers to stop all that wasted effort. However, people will not stop what they're doing to solve a problem unless they have a clearly better alternative. That's what this analysis is trying to provide.

Next the analysis performs the trickiest step of all: find the root causes. Rather than the vague task of "finding the root causes of the problem," the process tells us to "find the root causes of the intermediate causes." That's a much more focused and hence easier task to perform correctly. All it requires is studying the model and expanding it as necessary to show the root causes.

Substep C - Find the root causes of the intermediate causes

Substep A found that The Race to the Bottom among Politicians is the immediate cause dominant loop. Substep B found the intermediate cause of this is the universal fallacious paradigm, primarily Growth Is Good. What is the root cause of that intermediate cause? That the same asking: Why is The Race to the Bottom among Politicians dominant most of the time? What is the root cause of that dominance?

It took several years of work to study the system and build the initial simulation model. But once the race to the bottom was identified, the model grew quickly into the one shown below.

The race to the bottom and top loops are battling to see who can gain the most supporters. Special interests use deception to snare supporters. Virtuous politicians use the truth.

Currently the race to the bottom is winning. How exactly is it winning? What's the root cause?

Examination of the model shows the root cause is excessive undetected false memes. People cannot tell an undetected false meme from the truth, so they are equally infective. That's the exact mechanism used to make the race to the bottom the dominant loop, so it's the root cause.

This satisfies the five characteristics of a root cause: (1) It's clearly a major cause. (2) It has no productive deeper cause. The model tells us that. (3) It can be resolved. The model also tells us that. (4) Its resolution will not create bigger problems. The sustainability problem is the biggest long term problem the world has. Resolving this root cause to solve the problem cannot conceivably create a problem anywhere near that big. (5) There is no better root cause. The model is simple. It explains all major problem behavior. It's hard to imagine another better model, one based on inspection of the system. Still a better model and a better root cause might be possible. However, the one we've found is plenty good enough for a first iteration analysis. The root cause thus satisfies the five characteristics of a root cause.

From the model's point of view, "excessive undetected false memes" is the the root cause. However, this is not an easy phrase to grasp, so considering what the strategy of The Race to the Bottom among Politicians is, we've elevated the abstraction to:

The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

Corrupt politicians and their supporters use deception to win. That's their unspoken top strategy. It used to be that force was used to control your supporters. That's what kings and dictators did to put down dissent and encourage consent. But since the invention of democracy, revolution is no longer necessary to change rulers. The ballot box now does that. So if you can no longer fire bullets at people to get them to behave, why not fire false memes at them? These invisible bullets work so well that:

A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. – Vladimir Lenin.

It does not matter how many lies we tell, because once we have won, no one will be able to do anything about it. – Statement by Dr. Joseph Goebbels to Adolf Hitler, early 1930s, from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L Shirer.

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. – Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1910.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1917.

...the leading competitor for the title "father of public relations" is Edward Bernays, an Austrian immigrant to the United States and Sigmund Freud's nephew. In his 1928 book The Business of Propaganda, Bernays put into words something that every demagogue in history probably knew instinctively. He wrote, "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda [this distasteful term was later changed to 'public relations'] has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits. - James Hoggan, Climate Cover-Up, 2009, page 17.

Back in 2000, George W. Bush made a discovery of enormous consequence: you could base a whole political campaign on claims that were flatly untrue, like the claim that your big tax cuts for the wealthy went to the middle class, or the claim that diverting Social Security funds into private accounts would strengthen the system’s finances, and reporting would never point this out. That’s when I formulated my doctrine that if Bush said the earth was flat, headlines would read Views Differ on Shape of Planet. - Paul Krugman, Lies, Dammed Lies, and Elections, 2011.

The hypothesis is that the root cause of successful change resistance is effective deception in the political powerplace. How can we resolve that root cause?

Substep D - Find the feedback loops that should be dominant to resolve the root causes

This turned out to be the easiest substep of all. The Dueling Loops model showed that when The Race to the Bottom among Politicians was dominant, lies would win and the sustainability problem was unsolvable. But if the strength of that loop could be greatly reduced, The Race to the Top among Politicians would go dominant. This would lead to the truth about the problem dominating political decisionmaking, which would solve the problem.

We're almost done. How can we make The Race to the Top among Politicians loop go dominant?

Substep E - Find the high leverage points for making the loops in substep D go dominant

This was also a surprisingly easy step. The high leverage points emerged as the model was constructed and thousands of simulations (each a quick low experiment) were run to see how pushing on the model here or there caused it to behave. There are two high leverage points, as shown below.

The first high leverage point is repulsion to corruption. The higher this is, the more repulsion memes appear when detected false memes goes up. As repulsion memes increase, so does supporter desertion due to repulsion. This causes Supporters Due to Degeneration to move back to the stock of Not Infected Neutralists.

The second high leverage point is general ability to detect political deception. An increase here causes an increase in detected false memes. That affects two other nodes. It increases repulsion memes and decreases undetected false memes. In other words, the more people can spot deception, the fewer the lies that go undetected.

Of the two high leverage points, general ability to detect deception offers much higher leverage. It affects two nodes, not just one. It also affects the all important node of undetected false memes, whose normally high level is the root cause of successful change resistance. Therefore general ability to detect deception is the high leverage point.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.

What happens when we push on this high leverage point? Here's how the model behaves before we do that: (Please remember this is an uncalibrated model. It's only useful for general relative insights, not exact predictions.)

The Dueling Loops are cyclic. As the percentage of degenerate supporters grows, it requires more and more deception to gain more supporters. Politicians are competing for support from large for-profit corporations and their owners, the rich, for donations and influence. The bigger the lie, the more supporters a degenerate politician gets.

But once the lies get too big, the system self-corrects. The lies are now so big they don't fool as many people. After a delay for people to figure this out and the word to spread, the public's general ability to detect political deception spontaneously shoots up. As it does, supporters flee for the lives from the race to the bottom to the race to the top. They don't want any more of those false wars, unnecessary recessions, false enemy attacks (like on gays, blacks, non-believers, etc), corruption, excessive income inequality (like what the Occupy Movement is protesting against) and so on. The race to the top then becomes dominant for awhile.

However, because there's currently nothing to keep general ability to detect political deception permanently high, people forget. And those scheming bad guys can perfect new forms of deception. This causes race to the top supporters to gradually move back to the race to the bottom, and a cycle begins all over again. This cycle is easily seen in the way political party dominance waxes and wanes in national elections.

What happens if society decides to make people truth literate permanently by pushing on the high leverage point? Something like this:

General ability to detect deception is raised from low to high starting in 1900. It takes the system a long time to adjust, but after about 30 years crossover occurs. The percent rationalists becomes greater than percent degenerates. The rationalists keep rising, and soon The Race to the Top among Politicians is highly dominant. It stays that way indefinitely.

This is important, because the definition of sustainability is the ability to continue a defined behavior indefinitely.

This completes the analysis of the change resistance subproblem. Are these radically different conclusions heresy? Is it a new approach that could work? Or is it just the muttering of some tired old crackpot?

The complete analysis

First warm up with this 29 page easy-to-read paper, one that was not written for academic journals but for you! The paper was written immediately after creation of the basic Dueling Loops model, so it has a fresh and vital quality.

The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:

Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.

The Universal Causal Chain

This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.

Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.

In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow.Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.

This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.

For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.

Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.

Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.

The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.

Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.

In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.

The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.

The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.

This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.

In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.

This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.

The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.

Solutions

There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.

Given the principle that all problems arise from their root causes, the reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.

Summary of Solution Elements

Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:

Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.

The 4 Subproblems

The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.

Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.

Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.

The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.

This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.

B. How to Achieve Life Form Proper Coupling

In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.

What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.

The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.

The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.

Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.

This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.

Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.

This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.

Note how generic most of the tools/concepts are. They apply to far more than the sustainability problem. Thus the glossary is really The Problem Solver's Guide to Difficult Social System Problems, using the sustainability problem as a running example.